Going Down Fast (36 page)

STORE IN MEMORY

She took a taxi home. She felt exhausted and even the doorman asked if something were wrong. She crawled into her avocado gown and unmade bed, turning on Music till Dawn. She kept on the small lamp. Should she call Leon? She wanted comforting. But if Anna were there. She did not like that. Was he really not sleeping with her? Anna was lumpish but she wore her sweaters too tight. Anna had heavy thighs and a big behind. Leon couldn't want her. She drew her hands along her own thighs. The emptiness of the apartment coagulated, the wind tried the locks. She had to force herself to turn and look behind her. She touched the phone and turned the radio louder. But if someone broke in she would not hear. She lowered the volume.

ILLEGAL FUNCTION NAME

She squinted at the light through her ring, twisting it back and forth, then burrowed into bed. How the wind moaned off the lake. Her hand came slowly up her thigh, gingerly. She shut her eyes tight, clenched the lids. Her muscles waited. She saw herself strapped to a table, a narrow white table, conscious, naked, powerless. She was strapped to the table, her arms bound above her head. Two men in white surgical masks drew her legs wide, wide apart. They strapped them down. She could not move. She strained her muscles rigid. Things would be done to her. Others watched. The eyes over the masks looked at her. Naked she lay in the hard light, spread open. They would make her suffer pleasure and they would watch. Deliberate as an insect, long nails catching, the hand walked up the inside of her thigh.

INPUT COMPLETED TO TERMINAL

Leon

December

He had been invited to show at the Cellar Cinematheque with three others, but Elliott had made it painfully clear he had to turn up with something new. They grew bored with him, they put him down with a shrug. Mindless bastards who could play with color film and Nagra tape recorders. Him with his Bolex. He could splice something together that would blow their minds all over the ceiling. Act fast. Get Elliott to let him use the Moviola at that place that did training films. Work all night. Clean up before they got in in the morning. Twist his arm.

Shots from the reptile house: Live mice were put in with the small boa constrictors. They took hours to swallow a mouse. Boa's mouth: mousehead in. Mouse kicking. Mouse swallowed to mid-belly. Then all in but the snakelike tail.

A girl danced in front of a big concave mirror he'd borrowed and set up in the livingroom. Dusty floorboards, attic gray light. Sound of mindless crooning. This girl was a college dropout whose parents had since shipped her off to a sun-and-ski school to get her away from him. Bones poking through her skinny back. Shuffling back and forth in front of the mirror with a birdcage in her hand: image of despair, image of narcissistic trapped adolescence.

The projector ran dry. White screen. Wastepaper images from
Black Orpheus
and
The Trial
. Mounds of wastepaper, coils of paper stirring. He would prefer bones, tincans, beer-bottles and condoms and autobodies rusting in the sun. He would prefer:

CAROLINE VISITS THE SANITARY CANAL

Out through the railroad yards that on the map looked like bundles of muscle fiber, past quarries and claypits and gas storage tanks and the Hawthorne Race Track. The Sanitary Canal: the name evokes old kotexes floating down the Mississippi to the sea. Drowned Caroline borne along with churning sewage pumped out of the city daily, nightly.

Her face with eyes closed perfectly suggested soft death. Her eyes full open with the chin lowered became the mask of a tortured child. He had not used her well enough. He had not unwound a coil of past from within spieling images that would explode.

Another reel. Badly exposed, useless. He had sat in the last car of a “B” train coming all the way south from Howard Street and shot into the lighted windows: short glimpses of women stirring suppers, men looking out hopelessly from grimy sills, couples embracing, babies kicking in their cribs, old men playing cards around brief tables. The sequence was never quite in focus, grainy, underexposed, yet it hit him with a poignant restlessness that made him remember being sixteen: a sense of possibilities and random concatenations merging beyond his empty hands. There, there people were really living, out there where he could not reach.

He looked at one image again and again. A woman with dark hair and dusty skin—Negro or Italian or Mexican or anything from most places—a small, tired looking woman stood in a flash of plain dingy room with cot, washstand, wave of ashgray curtain. As the camera went by plucking her like an apple tasted only never eaten she bent to the cot, picked up the pillow and clasping it in her arms rocked it against her breasts, a limp flat pillow.

Sheldon Lederman's Dream of the City of Light

White towers. With brick and stone it had been a matter of piling little pieces. Something fussy in that that could never please a man who liked to think in terms of large functions. But now building was rational. Not like those older skyscrapers with frou-frou on top. Might have the Taj Mahal perched like a hat on a medical building. Victorian protocol: couldn't cut through the red tape. Like Fern who could never come out and say anything. Hinting, sulking, rustling in corners, moving little objects. Even when he knew what she was getting at, her prissy ways infuriated him so much he wouldn't admit he understood.

But a poured concrete building on a steel frame with walls of glass: that moved him. Light, cleanliness, order, totality. The truth was he was shrewder even in aesthetics than his wife with her Ethical Culture airs and his hippy son. His own desk was free form. No reason to think in cubes once you grasped that the materials created their own dynamic. Had to keep an open mind, up to date, receptive. Take the helix. Technology could render you obsolete as an old pen you would dip in the inkwell to write, rusty point, yes, penholder and point and clotty black ink. For a moment he almost liked remembering. Dip, scratch, scratch.

White tower after white tower with lots of green space: he had learned that from the professors' attacks on the first part of the Plan to go into construction, those middle-income high rises, Prairie Gardens. You spent green space lavishly, you surrounded your towers with parks. He had learned, hadn't he? The easy symbol. Grass was affluence and nicety. Learn their symbols. He had been doing that since college. Symbol of tie, symbol of cufflink, symbol of right restaurant for lunch. Mistakes like starting to paint the house himself when he'd first moved his family to Skokie, he made only once. Learn or die. Unless you were a lucky parasite like Fern or his ludicrous sons.

About shops he had his own ideas. You had a floor in the high rise, yes, but only small shops. Like the old corner grocery, expensive. Pay for the privilege of convenience. You also had a shopping plaza for each complex because women did want to get out and run into each other. Each shopping plaza was different: it would have a catchy name and a different motif. One would have big outdoor animal figures and cartoon characters. Another would have fountains. Another, a covered mall with hanging plants and benches. People would stroll in the plazas: no sharp dividing line between plaza and park. No line between leisure and consumption. Outdoor cafes, glassed in seasonally. People would circulate into the plazas, strolling, pushing babies, windowshopping and spending. Each plaza was different and they would spend in each. A woman's shopping was her business but also her play, her recreation. The more idiots men like his brother-in-law Sol with his dismal
schlock
shoestores. Put in a coffeebar and business goes up twenty percent.

Sol understood zero. Sol still acted as if people came in once every six months for their pair of shoes, and you had to cram it on them and get them out. People all had shoes. They wanted to buy entertainment and pleasure. Women wanted to buy youth and attractiveness and distraction and sex appeal.

In the White City lights would play over trees in the parks at night. Everything lit up. No dark corners. Light was better, cheaper than police. His other basic idea was a modular approach. Each complex would handle its own waste disposal, own maintenance, own road repair. Cut down on crippling strikes. Cut down on municipal graft by taking it out of the public sector. The University community had its own police force already, and used a private pickup service and its own snow disposal to supplement the city. Increasingly the contractor provides a life package for his client. Client would know what he was getting in the way of schools, shopping, neighborhood, life style. In some developments the housing package would include lawn, trees, barbecue pit, swimming pool, carpeting, furniture, appliances and even car. By the time most people were twenty to twenty-five, you could figure out their lifetime earning expectancy.

Suppose someone had thought they could figure him out? But if he were starting out now, if he were twenty-five and where he was now. It took so long to reach a point where you could see the long view. There was his boy Sid the kid, an old man at twenty-five. If they were to trade ages, the brat would never notice. What a loser, what a whiner. Every time he saw him he felt like asking him what rock he had crawled out from under. Been that way since four, five. Fern always acting the big protective buffer, getting between him and the boys. Sometimes he thought she'd done it intentionally, brought up those two idiots to mock him. Then Leon turning up with that big sullen slut, always some woman, always, always. He had no respect for his family, no respect for anyone. Her suddenly up and dragging him out of there in the middle of the conversation. Before he'd had a chance to say half of what he meant. Leon was always like that, explosive and slippery and gone. Leaving him raw with anger, hot with words.

No, don't think, don't think. The quickness of his own mind, the orderliness and mastery of details, the skill with people, all that he owed to his years of law: but never until he had moved into renewal had he felt his own scope. It was the breadth of the job that pleased him.

The trustees of the great and little institutions he had to work with by and large had the minds of caretakers. They saw nothing bigger than the far side of the ledger. They pinched pennies, they were afraid of planning as creeping socialism. They planned for their corporations and used computers for everything from taking inventories to mixing steel, yet they were scared witless, they held on to their balls at the idea of city planning. The timidity of institutional trustees about sinking money into anything they might be held liable for made him feel like wringing their necks. Longterm development needs made them quake in their boots. They had to be wheedled along and diddled with a step at a time. Big men, men with vision didn't think that way. Take a man like David Rockefeller. He thought and operated big. Now he was pushing down part of Morningside Heights, now he was clearing a whole neighborhood for Lincoln Center, now he was expanding Rockefeller Center or shooting up a huge hotel, now he was moving into piers on the riverfront. Well, if he personally had that sized piece of just Standard Oil, just Jersey, he would think big too.

It was a historical moment, when the ride of decay was being rolled back in the cities, when great stewards of corporations and banks, men honed on the law and finance, turned their talents and vision into the rebuilding of the cities into proper setting for such men and such corporations. All the buzzards of gouging slumlords, those petty small thinking real estate hoarders and speculators—their day was over. The day of the smalltime ward politician with their payoffs not to enforce the building codes, to let in this saloon and close down that one: they were joining the other dinosaurs. Not that there wasn't a lot of porkbarreling left, but the mayor kept it under control. It was rational, it served.

Those hearings almost drove him crazy. A whole burnt offering of time on the part of some really valuable administration men and experts, for what? You couldn't have the man on the street putting through a logical and rational plan. He couldn't see farther than his shoelace. How could they rebuild a city without disrupting some individuals' private plans? If they gave in to every group in the city that decided their toes were being stepped on, the city would come down around their ears before they got a move on. It was all windowdressing for what had been decided two years before, but it slowed them down, it wasted valuable men's time. All those pathetic nobodies getting up to say their piece in public: “I'm Mrs. Homemaker and I don't want to move, so you can't build your expressway.” “I'm John Doe and I have eight kids I can't support anyway, so I refuse to let you tear down the filthy shack I live in, because I am so attached to it, my home sweet home.” What an incredible ritual, all those nobodies getting up one at a time to say their piece and expecting the wheels of the world to stop turning. Like Leon, always expecting to be the exception, to get away with it, brazen as ever still, still. Persisting into the dirt, not one sign he had learned anything, that he felt what had happened to him, kicked out of the University, branded a common thief, judged in court unfit as father.

To remain clearsighted. Beyond the business district, the groves of high rise. Beyond, the garden cities, and beyond that ring, the industrial and research belt, then fancier wooded suburbs for semi-country living. The black plain of Chicago was obsolete. Most people on it were unnecessary or soon would be, because cheap labor was no longer economical. Managers, men of ideas and vision, technicians who put things through, these were components of the future. Communications men, media men, men specializing in design research, engineering consumption, market analysis, systems analysis. But the great unwashed, those clods out there, the restless noisy lumpen, they were obsolete. Society no longer needed stupidity and brawn, brawlers and breeders. The proles belonged with the dinosaurs. Consumption was increasingly the job of the upper middle class. They had a more and more dominant share of the pie. Slum dwellers were economically extinct. No city would rot from the center to accommodate them. No city would need to.